The Fujitsu VP2200 is a water-cooled 64-bit vector
processor with a peak speed of 1.25 gigaflops. It has a clock
cycle time of 3.2 ns (6.4 ns scalar cycle time), 32 kbytes of
vector registers and four words-per-cycle bandwidth to memory.
The main memory is 512 Mbytes and there is 1 Gbyte of SSU (secondary
memory).

The VP2200 runs Fujitsu's System V Release 4 UNIX
(UXP/M) and is available both for batch and interactive use.
Network access is through TCP/IP connections onto the campus Ethernet,
AARNet and the Internet. There is an FDDI connection to the mass
data storage system, the CM-5 and the Visualization Laboratory
and a number of other selected systems on campus.

Both a vectorizing FORTRAN compiler and a vectorizing
C compiler are installed together with third-party software packages.

The VP2200 system and its software are now quite
mature and few changes occurred in 1995. The LVCF disk management
software was installed in 1995 allowing disk striping and concatenation
of physical volumes. The system was available for 99.3
per cent of the year.

Although usage of packages is not high at ANU since
many researchers are developing their own codes, the packaged
software base is gradually growing and now includes:

Packages and libraries on the VP2200 include:

Chemistry

Mathematics

Graphics

Biological Sciences

CADPAC

IMSL 1.1

PGPLOT

ACES II

NAG 15

NCAR

AMBER

GAMESS

ELLPACK

HDF

X-PLOR

MOPAC 93

LAPACK

AMPAC 2.1

BLAS

CRYSTAL 92

ITPACKV

GAUSSIAN 94

SSLII

MM2/MM3/MINP

SPARTAN

Environmental Sciences

COLUMBUS

CCM1

MOLPRO 94

CCM2

WIEN

DISCOVER

Mass Data Storage System

The robotic cartridge-tape data silo supplied by StorageTek was
in its second year of use in 1995. The ACS4400 initially has
approximately 2 terabyte capacity and is equipped with four 36
track tape drives plus 2 more on loan from StorageTek. These
are expected to be upgraded with two helical scan 'Redwood' drives
with speeds in excess of 10 Mbytes per second and with tape capacities
such that the total amount of possible storage will be in the
150 to 300 terabyte range. Unfortunately delays in the supply
of upgraded file migration software prevented the delivery of
the Redwood system in 1995 and regrettably required the Facility
to dampen demand for further growth of usage of the system.

These delays also forced the continued use of a Sun 690 as the
file server, limiting the use that could be made of the eight
to ten processor SPARCcentre 2000 with 60 Gbytes of disk array
that is intended to be the file server. StorageTek continued
to loan the University a 40 Gbyte RAID disk array to augment the
disk space on the Sun 4/690.

Despite these difficulties, during the year usage and demand grew
rapidly with the system accommodating 1.5 million files and almost
600 Gbytes of data (close to the planned capacity for the first
stage). In addition to users of the supercomputer systems (and
some specific projects from other ITS machines), there were 82
users supported in special projects on the mass storage system.

In late December the first stage of the ACSF PowerChallenge system
was installed at the ANU. The system initially has 8 R8000 processors,
2 Gbytes of memory and 70 Gbytes of disk. In early 1996 it will
be upgraded to 16 R10000 nodes with a peak spead of over 6 Gflops.

Other ANUSF systems

The Facility also makes generally available several graphics workstations
in the Visualization Laboratory. These and the software environment
are described in the relevant section of this report. In addition,
a HP9000/735 workstation with a peak speed of 200 Mflops is available
on a limited basis. The MATLAB package is installed on this machine.
The 8 processor SPARCcentre SC2000 (see above) was also made
available in a limited way to users while it awaited full incorporation
into the mass data storage system. A FORTRAN 90 compiler from
Cray Research is installed on the SC2000 and made available to
users. The LINDA distributed computing environment is installed
on ANUSF workstations for internal developmental use.

Connection Machine

In 1995, the Facility continued supporting users of the Connection
Machine of the Parallel Computing Research Facility. As explained
elsewhere in this report, a part of CM-5 resources were subject
to allocation by the Time Allocation Committee.

The CM-5, installed in June 1992 with 32 nodes has a peak speed
of 4 Gflops and 1 Gbytes of memory. It has a front-end Sun 4/690
with four processors, 256 Mbytes of memory and 8 Gbytes of disk.
The CM-5 has a Fortran90-like compiler, C* (an extension of the
C language), *LISP, the CMSSL scientific subroutine library, the
CMX11 graphics library and miscellaneous support tools.